Lawrence Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Since the 1990s, the supply of deeply subsidized housing has decreased as the US population and need for housing have increased. Trump’s proposed cuts to HUD won’t help.
At the Ashwood-Chadstone estate, Port Phillip Housing Association has built high-quality homes, with no visible difference between the 72 private and 206 community housing dwellings.
PPHA
Concerns about the privatisation of public housing estates should not blind us to the benefits of the transfer of public housing to the not-for-profit community housing sector.
Public housing tenants are much more likely than renters in other sectors to struggle to get repair and maintenance done.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Grenfell Tower residents tragically got the world’s attention only after a disastrous fire. So what would public housing residents in Australia say about their living conditions?
The secure private garden on the redeveloped Carlton estate.
Kate Shaw
Why can’t the state fund an ongoing program of upgrading, replacing and building public housing? On the evidence to date, private developers aren’t doing a better job of it.
When the government decides to evict, public housing tenants’ lives are turned upside down.
Reuters
The last 24 public housing tenants holding out against eviction from Millers Point, Dawes Point and the Sirius Building still hope the government may show some compassion.
Restoring and expanding Australia’s run-down public housing stocks will need an increase in funding on top of the reforms in the budget.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
The budget is pushing for a much-needed reboot of the social housing sector. What it isn’t offering is extra funding to renew and expand run-down housing stocks.
Having embraced expert advice on bond aggregation to finance housing, Scott Morrison needs to ensure the Commonwealth commits to long-term investment and cooperation.
Julian Smith/AAP
The bond aggregator by itself cannot create a housing development pipeline. It needs co-investment from government to make it feasible.
Treasurer Scott Morrison is eyeing bond aggregation as a way to finance social housing, but government funding is still needed under that model.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
In the second part of our review of what The Conversation experts have to say about housing, we focus on affordability, social housing and what government can do about a growing crisis.
To meet the needs of lower-income households, housing should be both affordable and located near public transport and other services.
Graeme Bartlett/Wikimedia
Victoria has been lagging behind other states in developing an affordable housing strategy. Now that one has been released, how well does it meet the needs of households on lower incomes?
New South Wales is the state that has suffered the biggest fall in available public housing stock since 2009. This has led to protests.
Teresa Parker/AAP
Although the federal-state agreement does it inadequately and lacks transparency, an enduring program of federal funding for operational expenses is essential to sustain the social housing system.
To understand how households cope, we may need to look beneath broad patterns of affordability to the interplay of housing costs with other problems.
IDuke/Wikimedia Commons
Housing affordability is often not the only problem households face. More often the compounding effects of multiple problems leave people unable to cope, which is why one solution won’t work for all.
The housing affordability crisis isn’t limited to the big cities – the Tweed Heads area, for instance, is rated worse than Melbourne in the latest survey.
AAP
The need for new housing solutions for these low-income groups is clearly a pressing requirement.
With 700,000 vulnerable Australians depending on public housing, any proposal to change its status is likely to set off alarm bells.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
The report’s stated goal is to make the social housing system work better. It does not present as a manifesto for an entirely marketised and deregulated framework driven by the profit motive.
The historical, social and moral reasons for retaining the Sirius Building for public housing are compelling, but the state government is focused on the money from its sale.
Jenny Noyes/Newzulu/AAP
The state is ignoring historical, social and moral reasons to keep public housing in Heritage areas of Sydney. Its sell-off will further divide the city between rich and poor and end a rich history.
Woody Guthrie’s tenancy in Fred Trump’s Beach Haven apartment complex coincided with a diagnosis of Huntington’s disease.
Library of Congress
New research finds almost a million Australians are living in poor or very poor-quality housing, with more than 100,000 in dwellings regarded as very poor or derelict.
Nne-star-rated ‘Catalyst’ houses built to maximise passive solar principles were evaluated against seven control houses built to DHHS standards.
Trivess Moore
Emerging research challenges the idea that sustainable housing is unaffordable. It shows sustainability and good design can be affordable when analyses include social, health and wellbeing benefits.
The Queensland government’s interpretation of public housing transfers conflicts with that of Labor colleagues federally and in some other states.
AAP/Dan Peled
Given its flagship status, the Logan public housing project’s abandonment could be a serious setback for Australian housing and urban policy.
When public housing like the properties in Sydney’s Millers Point is privatised, it profoundly changes the social mix of the inner city to something much more homogenous.
AAP/Newzulu/Peter Boyle
The NSW government agenda would deny the ‘right to the city’, that network of diverse communities, practices and places which give rise to the convivial and inclusive potential of cities.
PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, and Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney